The Author Responds

We conclude our series on Parish Boundaries with a response from the author himself. In today's post John McGreevy, the I.A. O'Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts & Letters and Professor of History at Notre Dame, responds to the contributors of this city while also reflection how he thinks Parish Boundaries has aged the last twenty years. By John McGreevy

It’s a pleasure and honor to be here. Thanks to Tim Gilfoyle for organizing the
panel and to this distinguished group of colleagues for their willingness to
participate and for their shrewd comments.
I’m especially grateful to Jim Grossman, whose red pen, in the long-ago
days before track changes, improved the manuscript. I first met Jim in his
office at the Newberry Library a few blocks from here, 23 years ago. I was
thrilled when he and Kathleen Conzen accepted my unwieldy dissertation into the
then just starting urban history series at University
of Chicago press. I knew he and Kathy would make my dissertation much
better and so they did.

So how did I get to that dissertation, entitled, as Lila
Berman noted, “American Catholics and the African-American migration, 1919-1970”?
It’s a short story. I wandered into graduate school, as we might say, without a
“research agenda.” I wavered between high school teaching and college teaching
and in fact I ended up teaching for a
time at Hales Franciscan high school, an African-American Catholic high school
on the south side of Chicago. At Stanford I loved the coursework and enjoyed
working with superb and generous faculty such as David Kennedy and George
Fredrickson, ultimately the first and second readers on my dissertation. But I
agonized over a dissertation topic. I
did a seminar paper on 19th century populism in California. I did
one on draft resisters in California and even wrote a dissertation proposal on
the topic.[i] I
finally settled on Catholics and race
after reflecting on my own life and that of my parents, very much raised in a Catholic milieu, with both of my
parents having gone to Catholic grade school, high school, college and, for my
father, medical school and then both working
in catholic hospitals for much of their professional lives. This Catholic milieu
– roughly 25% of the US population and a standard topic in, say, German history
-- seemed absent from the literature on United
States history.

But what would be my angle?
Probably no topic seemed as exciting to graduate students at Stanford as
“race” broadly construed, and George Fredrickson’s work, and more distantly
that of David Roediger, Barbara Fields and others animated late night
conversations.[ii] And
then like Amanda Seligman I read Arnold Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto:Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Cambridge, 1983). Hirsch mentioned Catholics episodically and I
started following his footnotes, which led to a full summer going through the
Catholic Interracial Council papers in the Chicago Historical Society archives.
The late Archie Motley befriended me there and pointed me to other local
sources and archives. I even ended up, I should add, marrying and raising four children with a local archivist. So I had a topic.

Now to the commentators. Wallace Best accurately notes that
I saw my task as to insert “religion” not just Catholicism into twentieth century narratives in US history. I was lucky
and didn’t anticipate that religion would become such a central topic –
although more in political and cultural history than in urban history -- in the
decade or so after my dissertation.

Best also points to a central tension in the book. Who is it
about? Fundamentally it told the story of

Euro-American Catholics and their
building of a world in the United States and its disruption by the massive and
unexpected migration of African-Americans into that world. The second half of
the book details the simultaneous (and at times reinforcing) earthquakes of the
civil rights movement and the Second Vatican Council.

The argument on
neighborhood change has endured reasonably well. We forget, really, how “white”
our cities were for much of the twentieth century with Chicago, for
example, over 90% white into the 1930s. The historical memory of Euro-American
Catholics in this population, to paraphrase Chris Cantwell’s helpful comments,
was initially Europe, and they tried to rebuild in the American context an
institutional and devotional matrix not of American origin. Catholics were
often a dominant group, numerically, in particular urban neighborhoods and I’m
grateful to Amanda Seligman for noting how a “white” response to
African-Americans was often and fundamentally a Catholic response. The power of
parish boundaries and institutions was to block Jews and white Protestants – as
Lila Berman persuasively argues – from the Euro-American Catholic vision. A few
years after Parish Boundaries Gerald Gamm’s excellentUrban Exodus,
on Catholics and Jews in Boston, even more convincingly displayed the
importance of Catholic institutions and parishes in defining American urban
life.[iii]

African-American Catholics did play a pivotal role in my story
as mediators and protagonists, sharply bringing into focus both Euro American
Catholic racism and idealism. The most wrenching scenes in the book are when
African-American Catholics press their claims for access to schools and
institutions as Catholics, and are the rejected. The criticism that
African-American Catholics never fully have their own voice in Parish
Boundaries is a fair one and I still think African-American Catholics merit
more attention from historians.[iv]

Amanda Seligman also asks why I tried to write a more
national story as opposed to following the marvelous example of, say, Lizabeth
Cohen in Chicago or Tom Sugrue whose work on Detroit appeared at the same time
as Parish Boundaries.[v]
Practically, the decision stemmed from that summer at the Chicago Historical
Society, where the papers of the Chicago Catholic Interracial Council opened a
window onto a national movement. As a result, I spent a few months staying on
friends’ couches and moving from city to city and tracking connections across
the urban North. The existence of this liberal Catholic network reaffirmed for the
historical importance of the Second Vatican Council, where a generation of
Catholic activists saw once lonely work for racial justice lauded even as they
came to understand their church and themselves in a different way.

Does this story carry up until 2016? I don’t think there
will be a second volume of Parish Boundaries, or if so it will be a very
different book. What I could dimly see in the early 1990s– the diminishment of
the Catholic subculture – is obvious now. The Catholic school system is still
the nation’s largest private system, but it’s much smaller and exists in a
transformed context of charter and other nominally public schools; Catholic
parishes are still numerous but perhaps half as many as at their height in the
1970s; the intensity of Catholic affiliation
is much less with 25% weekly mass attendance now as opposed to 70% in
the 1960s. The sheer number of Catholics is still impressive because of the
Latino migration to the United States, and this process of Catholicism becoming
a majority Latino church demands further study. But Latinos are generally less
tied to local parish structures and have fewer Catholic schools available for
them to attend. In all those senses Parish Boundaries matter less,
although with the Catholic church still the largest private landowner in most
cities, they do still matter.

Euro-American racism remains with us, of course, as the
summer of 2016 demonstrated. In that
sense tracing the origins of racism –
understanding its mutations over time, not simply cataloging it – remains a
vital task and perhaps Parish Boundaries will have some continued
usefulness in that effort. The last footnote in the book is to Alasdair
MacIntyre’s After Virtue, just then becoming influential as a meditation
on local communities within the flux of modernity. All local communities – from
university faculties to urban parishes -- are by their nature exclusive but historians
can focus their attention on precisely how they draw lines and what lines they
draw.

McGreevy's attempt to tellCatholicism's global history

If I were to advise my younger self I would encourage coming
up for air a bit more, recognizing that Catholicism of all institutions is a
global one, and that comparisons with other Catholic milieus might have sharpened
the book’s analytical frame. Such comparisons might distinguish between the particular
characteristics of the 20th century African-American migration into
Euro-American neighborhoods and enduring patterns. The twinned impact of
migration and the Second Vatican Council in the American context, for example, might
help us better comprehend how European Catholics understood themselves in an
era of accelerating Muslim migration in the 1960s and 1970s.

I recently learned, for example, that even as the Jesuits
in Detroit established their initial high school and what would become the
University of Detroit in the early 20th century, Egyptian Muslims
built the city’s first mosque a few blocks away.[vi] Global Islam, like global Catholicism, is
understudied, especially the movement of its ideas, institutions and people
across oceans and national boundaries. When I began my career I did so as a 20th
century United States historian attempting to bring “religion” into the
national story. When I applied for jobs I applied for 20th century
jobs. When I listed courses I could teach I stressed the United States survey.
That’s still my fundamental guild identity. But I am now convinced that the modern United States history of the future,
certainly the modern United States religious history, will flourish even more in
a self-consciously global context.

[ii]
George Fredrickson,The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspective on Slavery,
Racism and Social Inequality, (Middletown, 1988); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness:
Race and the Making of the American Working Class, (Verso, 1991); Barbara
Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race and
Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, (Oxford, 1982),
143-177.

Comments

What a wonderful conclusion to this retrospective series of posts. Thank you for these insights and reflections, Dr. McGreevy, and particularly for stressing the importance of thinking globally when writing and teaching U.S. history. Like many of those who shared their thoughts on Parish Boundaries, I read the book in graduate school and found it critical to my thinking on religion and race in twentieth century America.